Design Progress
Goal Exploration
This week, we discussed about our goal as a Transformational Game. The questions we ask to orselves was focusing on:
– What’s the purpose of making middle schoolers learn media literacy?
– How to make them be logical thinking?
– What is their initial state with the topic?
– What are out approaches/specific topics to teach?
What to teach?
To answer the questions, we explored relevant works as movies, novels & games to see how the topic is presented before. From the common points in these works, we summarized a high-level philosophy to teach:
“Everyone lies for purposes. So what’s the purpose of each piece of information?”
We believed it help to confront misinformation if one always question him/herself before absorbing a piece of info.
What's the audience's initial state?
We made a survey for middle schoolers to explore:
– Their current knowledge base about media literacy
– Their current means to confront misinformation
– The platform they are using to be exposed to informations.
Story Stucture
Client Feedback
In week 3, we presented our proposals last week to our client, and got their specific feedbacks, especially the second proposal’s story structure, as followed:
Change 1: Instead of an AI, the player is acting as a double agent infiltrating the empire as a part of their propaganda team.
Why: This will allow us to integrate the mechanics of finding evidence as the next proposed change while using a lot of the same mechanics playing as an AI would allow.
Change 2: Instead of just sowing discord in the first half, players must uncover the true motivations and plans of the Empire by piecing together different pieces of information (this can include scouring the internet, talking to people, a lot of the mechanics suggested in game 2)
Why: This allows us to integrate the mechanic of putting together different pieces of information, not all of which is accurate, that I think will hugely allow us to promote critical thinking and we can teach a lot about source checking, motivations, etc here
Change 3: Once they determine the motivations and plan of the Empire, they try to continue doing their work as members of the propaganda team but instead of promoting the empire they are trying to reveal the truth and stop their evil plans. This also must be done while avoiding detection.
Catch: If they do the first half wrong and misunderstand the plans of the empire, their efforts may help promote the Empire instead of defame it.
Note: This adds elements of ‘Intentions gone askew.’
Why: This capitalises on the mechanics you proposed in which students are learning how to use techniques that will spread disinformation, but it builds upon the first half to show them how misunderstanding the root cause of something can sabotage the intentions of all of their actions.
1st Iteration of Story
Based on the feedback we received, we came up with our 1st iteration of the story. In that story, the player would play a detective who investigates a celebrity murder. This was met with uncertainty from both our client and our faculty. This was mainly due to our approach of first working on the story and keeping our teaching goals at a high level. At this point, our teaching goals were:
- Tackle Implicit Bias
- Address Algorithmic Bias
- Teach Malicious content
As we can see, these are very broad topics and needed much more granularity in terms of the actual game and narrative mechanics we would use to teach these topics.
We also sent out surveys to establish a blueprint of our target audience.
- What do they think of this topic?
- Why are existing methods of teaching not working?
- Which aspects of the teaching method need change?
Aside from that, we made a draft of our project logo and our programmers adapted a dialog manager framework that they had previously built in Javascript to Unity3D C#.